This district is intended to protect from contamination the groundwater recharge zone of the Town's existing and planned groundwater wells, which wells supply the potable water to many residential, businesses, institutional and other customers. This district is necessary because the wells by geological necessity must draw water from the ground levels lying closest to the surface, which grounds contain soil types that rapidly transmit pollutants, thereby threatening the entire groundwater supply being drawn upon by the wellhead.

The choice of regulation employed via this overlay district is to entirely prohibit certain uses that otherwise may be permitted by basic and other overlay districts falling within the confines of this overlay district. The regulations of this district shall supersede the regulations of all other such districts occupying the same geographic area.

The uses prohibited by this district have been identified in geologic surveys as risks for groundwater contamination. This method of regulation by complete prohibition is employed to provide the greatest assurance that inadvertent discharge of pollutants into the groundwater supply will not occur, since groundwater cleanup is often prohibitively expensive, and liability for such cleanup is often difficult or impossible to establish.

The uses prohibited by this district represent the state of present knowledge and most common description of such uses. As other polluting uses are discovered, or other terms of description become necessary, it is the intention to add them to the list of uses prohibited by this district. To screen for such other uses or terms for uses, no use shall be permitted in this district without first submitting its building, site and operational plans for Plan Commission review and approval.

The uses prohibited by this district are prohibited based upon the combined pollution experience of many individual uses, and the technology generally employed by that class of uses, which technology causes the uses as a class to be groundwater pollution risks. As the technology of identified use class changes to nonrisk materials or methods, upon petition from such a use, and after conferring with expert geological and other opinion, it is the intention to delete from the prohibited list, or allow conditionally, uses that demonstrate convincingly that they no longer pose a pollution hazard.

In dealing with uses or classes of uses that attempt to become permissible, under the terms of this district, by continuing to utilize pollutant materials but altering their methods of storage or handling, for example, transferring materials storage from leak-prone but explosion-resistant underground tanks, to leak-resistant but explosion-vulnerable aboveground vessels, it is not the intention to accept such alternate hazards as the basis for making a use permissible. It is the intention to continue the ban on such uses until the technology of the class of uses removes reliance upon the pollutant materials or processes.

The following uses are not permitted in this district: